


Out Of Place

by Red Dragon (Red_Dragonn)



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers: Prime
Genre: Alternate Universe, Computer Programming, Crossover, Dehumanization, Dimension Travel, Graphic Description, Multi, Prisoner of War, Rape, Torture, all the ocs are basically the Worst, as ive been saying, decybertronization?? idk, i reread last stand of the wreckers a bunch before i wrote this, im not sure what else to tag this with tbh, its just. an excuse for me to write some torture, so i had the aequitas trials on my mind, space bridge shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-07-07 17:02:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15912528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Red_Dragonn/pseuds/Red%20Dragon
Summary: Something was terribly wrong.





	Out Of Place

**Author's Note:**

> sometimes you just want a handwavey excuse to write one of your favorites getting torn to pieces. sometimes that handwavey excuse is an alternate continuity. fight me

Soundwave opened the space bridge, as he always did, and was somewhat alarmed to note that its signature emerald glow was replaced with that of a dim purple. He cocked his head, re-running the program in his head, and then closed it and tried again, to no new result. That was worrying. Unless Shockwave had seen fit to adjust the bridge, and Soundwave had not been informed; but that was far from likely. Soundwave could see everything on the Nemesis. 

But the Autobots were closing in, and it was not as though he had much time to waste.

He took one deep vent and stepped through the bridge anyway. 

* * *

Something was terribly wrong. 

Soundwave’s optics didn’t focus properly at first; the world through the bridge was black, it was white, it was too many colors, there were no colors. He couldn’t see. His center of balance was off, and he fell to his knees on the ground and waited as the world stopped spinning around him. The feed from his optical sensors crackled, warped, spat sparks across his HUD. His wiring felt like it was vibrating at odds to his body. His servos numb, cords tight, cables twisted; he was not okay. Something was terribly wrong. 

He tried to hail the Nemesis, ask for backup, but his files were all in disarray and he couldn’t even find the frequency, let alone send a signal. Team Prime would likely—hopefully—not find him, but he was still stranded, disoriented, body betraying him. And he had no idea where he was. His world was narrowed to the dense, hot soil under his fingers. All he knew was real was that. All he could feel. Could see. Could even comprehend. 

His head was still a mess; he started trying to sort through memory files frantically, software in even worse disarray than hardware. Random clips and snippets of the past took up too much space in his processor, and the codes for the Nemesis, for the space bridge executable files, were nowhere he could find.

His train of thought glitched. Clear code turned to jumbled numbers. What was he doing? Why was he here? Something was terribly wrong.

Something touched him on the shoulder and he felt, as though from afar, the shift in position as something, someone, somehow, furned him over and he realized he’d been lying face down on the ground; when had that happened? His vision glitched again. Blurry shapes failed to sort themselves into recognizable forms.

Something was terribly wrong with him. 

* * *

Soundwave turned his higher functions off and ran a diagnostic as soon as he could find the lines of relevant code through the haze of random data. 

He was right. Something was incredibly wrong. Somehow, his code was _incredibly_ jumbled. He focused on external input first—it would be the most important—but he knew that before long, he would have to put his head in order, or he would doubtless find himself going through the whole dizzying cycle again. 

Physical sensation, touch, that came first. His neural net registered pressure on his wrists, pressure on his shoulders, on his knees and along his shin. It took a moment for the input to settle. He was kneeling, arms bound behind his back. 

The recognition of that made him scramble to put his optical sensor input sorting programs back together. 

His head was tilted to the floor, sand the first things he saw were a pair of brightly-colored, red pedes. That was never a good sign. Soundwave immediately assumed the worst and figured he’d been captured by Autobots of some kind, but there was no one on Team Prime with a paint job like that. 

He picked his head up. 

He wasn’t wrong; they were Autobots. Four Autobots. Their design was strangely square, their alt modes almost unrecognizable, but he thought one might have been some sort of jet. The badge, however, was identical to the ones he recognized, and its signature red gleam was nothing but a terrible omen. The last thing Soundwave needed was to be an Autobot prisoner. 

The room itself was dark, poor metal. There were exposed bars in the walls, like it was a storage room rather than a proper cell. 

There was no sign of the Prime or any of his teammates, and though that may have seemed like a good thing, Soundwave was well aware that the Prime would keep his subordinates in check. 

No, this was nothing but bad news.

The Bots’ mouths were moving, but Soundwave still couldn’t make sense of the auditory input. He tried to reset the software, hit an error message, and forcibly overturned it. A low whine filled his audials, and then slowly, torturously slowly, it resolved itself into words. It took him even longer for them to start clicking together in his processor.

“ _—think_ it’s a ‘Con, but frag, they put their damn symbol on everything nowadays,” said a red mech. He mentally labeled it _number one._

“Not like it has a face,” said the one Soundwave thought might have been a jet, who he designated _two_. 

“Might be empurata,” said the third. 

“Face like that? Nah, mech, that’s not empurata. That’s a drone,” one said dismissively.

“Fraggin’ huge for a drone,” said three.

“I’ve seen bigger,” two chimed in.

“Guys, hey. It’s looking at us.”

“Huh.”

“Hey, drone,” asked the fourth one. “Do you speak?”

Soundwave’s speakers were in a state of immense disarray; he couldn’t have made a noise if he’d tried. 

“Look, its little face is flashing now,” four said. “That’s almost cute.”

“I had a drone that used to do that,” the third said, and Soundwave’s spark sank. He worked harder at onlining his speakers, but the mechanisms involved were complicated and the codes a jumbled mess, and he worried that it might take longer than he had. 

“Look at the shape of this thing, though,” Four said. “Skinny as hell under the chest plating, and it looks like some sort of flexing material.”

“I mean,” Two said dryly. “If I saw a bot that looked like this fragger, I’d be after them in a sparkbeat and you know it.”

“Not loving the face, though,” Three said. “I haven’t got a thing for empurata victims.”

“Told you that isn’t empurata,” said One. 

“Yeah, but it’s still slagging creepy,” Three insisted. 

“Not like you’d have to make it your conjunx or anything,” Four said. “Fragging ‘Con drone, dolled up to look like that? We might as well break in their toy.”

“I don’t know, Roadrage,” Three said carefully. “Think I’m gonna just…”

“Get the hell out of here, mech,” Two said. “But don’t fraggin rat us out. Not like we’re gonna break it.”

“Speak for yourself,” Four—Roadrage—said. “But, frag, it’s just a drone. We’ll keep its data intact.”

Three worked his jaw silently for a moment. “Fine. But…just… I… If you’re not done in six cycles, I’m radioing high command.”

“No need for a time limit that strict, Sidewinder,” One said. “We’ll be there in time for any new commands, alright?”

Sidewinder nodded. “Clean up after you finish, you demented scrapheaps.”

“Will do, boss!”

There was an awkward silence for a moment. Soundwave focused on forcing his speakers online, to no avail.

“You sure we can’t even rough it up a little?” Roadrage asked. 

“Course we can. I just wanted Sidewinder out of the way. He’s a bit of a bleeding spark."

“Frag, that’s the truth,” Two said. 

“Hey, Dropship,” One said. “You know those old scrap metal bars out back?”

“What about them?” Two—ostensibly Dropship—said. Soundwave managed to get a speaker to online with a crackle of static. No one noticed.

“Go grab…” One paused, squinting at Soundwave in a way that made him feel distinctly uncomfortable. “Eight. Longer the better.”

“Uh, Cutup?” said Dropship. “Why?”

“’Cause I told you so, mech,” Cutup snapped. “Are we going to stand around all day or will you _move your aft?_ ” 

Dropship sighed. “You’re not our captain—”

“I’ll do it,” Roadrage said, sighing and walking towards the door. 

Soundwave onlined a second speaker with another low blat of static. This one was much stronger in the lowest subharmonics, and the buzz filled the room with comforting vibrations for a moment. The two mechs left glanced at him in mild surprise. 

“Huh,” Cutup said. 

“What are you gonna want those bars for, anyway?”

“Look at the gaps in its armor,” Cutup said. He tapped a gap between Laserbeak’s flanges and Soundwave’s own armor, and then another lower down. Soundwave twitched away, but his motor relays weren’t all nearly as online as he’d have appreciated, and rather than moving back he merely shook in place. His speakers crackled ineffectively as he utterly failed to find a clip of Megatron ordering someone back. 

“Primus,” said Dropship. “What sane mech goes out with such flimsy armor?”

“None of them,” Cutup said. “’Cause it’s not a mech, it’s a _drone_.”

“Still,” Dropship said. “Decepticon badge. They usually build their slag to last.”

“Yeah, but maybe they wasn’t the ones who built it in the first place,” Cutup said. “Anyway, that’s not important. You see the gaps?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m gonna use the bars to hold it in place.”

Soundwave forced out another blat of static. No.

“You said we wouldn’t kill it—”

“And I won’t,” Cutup said. “I know how to do this.”

Dropship gave him a distinctly dubious look.

“Trust me.”

“If you kill it, you have to explain to Sidewinder.”

The door opened, and Roadrage staggered in with a pile of long, thin bars. They were wickedly sharp on one side, and Soundwave did not like that at all. “I thought we had to keep it alive?”

“That’s what I was saying,” Dropship said. 

“I won’t kill it,” Cutup said. “Dropship, can you grab me a bar?”

“Yeah,” Dropship said, and handed one to Cutup. 

“Might be short,” Roadrage said. “I don’t know exactly what you want it for.”

“Nah… this is perfect,” Cutup said, turning the bar over in his servos. It was nearly as long as Soundwave’s forearm.

Soundwave braced himself. 

Roadrage paused. “Wait, Cutup, what are you planning—”

Cutup drove the sharp end of the metal bar through one of Laserbeak’s flanges and forced it through his body until it passed out through Soundwave’s back. He couldn’t stop the low whine of pain escaping his still-hard-to-control speakers.

“Blue fluid,” Dropship said, voice low. “Where the hell did the cons find this thing?”

“Probably on this planet or something,” Roadrage said. “Cutup, what are you—”

“Hand me another bar.”

Roadrage did. 

Soundwave stiffened and braced himself, again, as the next bar pierced his chest and was forced through his circuits and out his back. The pain lanced through his scattered files, forcing up an old memory of the gladiator pits. 

Finally. 

He projected it to his screen. An image of a young, angry Megatronus, face contorted in a growl, yelling “ _stop!”_ across the arena.

“Whoa,” said Dropship.

“Huh,” said Cutup. “Who’s that?”

“Spiky,” Roadrage said. “Want another bar?”

“Yeah,” Cutup said, holding a hand out.

Soundwave played the clip again. Louder. He didn’t have anything else that he could add to it, but he braced himself and hoped it worked. 

Before the clip was even done playing, Cutup rammed the next bar through another gap in his armor. The end of Megatronus’s word devolved into a static screech.

Roadrage laughed.

Soundwave’s innermost energon boiled. He forced his way into the rest of his memory files as Cutup grabbed another bar from Roadrage. Megatron, again, yelling. Threats. He played the whole clip. When it got to Megatron screaming _“I will cut out your spark with my bare servos_ ” Cutup and Dropship both started to laugh as well, and then—

and then Cutup forced the next bar right through center of Laserbeak’s small center of mass and straight through him into Soundwave’s own body. The backlash across his bond to Laserbeak, and the buzzing silence on it afterward, was worse than any pain.

He didn’t even realize he was screaming until the three Autobots staggered back, faces contorted in pain. 

“ _Scrap_ this thing is loud,” Dropship gritted out, barely audible under the high-pitched shriek of Soundwave’s speakers, and he brought a hand up to touch his audials with a wince. Then he stepped forwards and hit Soundwave, hard, across the top of his helm. 

Soundwave’s speakers stuttered, and then another clicked to life. 

“That’s _it,”_ Cutup snarled, falling to his knees and then grabbing a bar from Roadrage again. He swung it around to hit Soundwave in the middle of his visor. Glass shattered under the impact. The sudden snap forced his diagnostics to run a second time out of control, and his speakers clicked off because of it. 

“Frag’s sake,” Roadrage muttered. “Damn audials are killing me.”

“No slag,” Cutup said. 

“Where the slag was that noise even coming from on that damn thing?” Roadrage said. “I don’t see any damn speakers.”

Soundwave finally cleared the fog out of his vision and synced two clips of Shockwave ordering everyone to _“Step away!”_ to play across his face. His speakers clicked and sputtered, and then played it. An error message popped up warning him that the image wouldn’t play properly; Soundwave put the warning off to the side with the other hundred and seventy six warnings that he wasn’t able to deal with yet,

“I _swear_ , this fragging thing,” growled Roadrage, pushing Cutup out of the way and then leaning over Soundwave’s bound and injured form. Soundwave flinched back as thick fingers poked at his torso plating, and then lower. Prime would be so disappointed in his soldiers if he knew about this. “Do you even understand us—”

“ _Yes.”_

“That’s fragging creepy,” Dropship said. “It _talks?”_

Soundwave turned his cracked screen towards the Autobot, and he shrank back.

“I,” Roadrage said, digging his fingers into the seams of Soundwave’s plating as though he were going to pry it off, “do not give a _frag_. Hey. Drone. Hey. You’re not—”

Soundwave forced together the clips of Roadrage talking, spliced them over quickly, and spat out a choppy recording snarling _“Not a drone_.”

Cutup said, _very_ quietly, “what?”

 _“Stop!”_ This time the clip was of Optimus.

Dropship… _smiled._

No, no, no, no, no no no, frag. 

_“Stop!”_ he played again. This time it was Megatron. And again, with a clip of Starscream, and another of Soundwave and two more of Breakdown and, and…

And they all glanced at one another, and then after the sixth clip all three of them started to laugh. 

“Want to hand me the pliers?” Roadrage managed, and Cutup tossed him something from the side of the room. Prime would be _devastated._ He always believed the best of his soldiers. And—he focused desperately on his thoughts and not the feeling of his hip plating being torn clean off—and Lord Megatron, too, he would have had harsh words with someone who treated a prisoner like this without even trying to get anything out of them—

A blunt finger forced itself against his array and Soundwave found himself jerked unpleasantly back to the present as friction warnings forced themselves across his HUD and shoved his other files out of the way again. Frag. 

He focused on being mad about that instead. It didn't seem constructive to pay attention to what was happening to his frame. 

Another finger worked its way into his valve, and more warnings popped up. Unconsciously, because he was still disoriented and weak and he knew it wasn’t worth trying, four of his tentacles unfurled and tried weakly to shove the Autobot away. 

“What the slag?” said one of the Autobots. Soundwave was tired of keeping track which one was which. 

“Fragger’s got tentacles,” the closest one said. “Grab them for me, would you? They look like they’d have teeth.”

Soundwave would have electrocuted the Autobots if he had the control to. Instead he was forced to attempt to wave them out of the way of the grasping servos of the jet Autobot and fail to keep out of his grip. 

He failed, but still jerked his tentacles against the Autobot’s grip. 

“Ugh. Cutup, can you help with this?” the jet gritted out, trying to hold onto all four tentacles with both hands.

The Autobot who had killed Laserbeak sighed and reached out a hand. The jet handed off Soundwave’s bundles of tentacles, and though Soundwave jerked at their fingers and tried to pull them away he found himself unable to. The Autobot grimaced at his handful of straining tentacles, and then forcibly bent them at an angle that hurt, fast, and tied them together in a knot. 

Error warnings for ruptured fuel lines appeared all over his field of vision. Pushing away more of his semi-organized memory files. Scrap.

A rough hand that he couldn’t even _see_ past all the pop-up messages crowding out his vision shoved him down flat against his back. The bars sticking through caught and shifted painfully, and Soundwave heard more than felt himself let out another static screech. The Autobot grunted, and hit Soundwave’s visor again; he twisted in agony, screech stuttering. He curled in on himself as best as he could. The top of his wing got caught against the floor; then another rough hand grabbed him by the shoulder and forced him flat again, and his wing twisted wrong and snapped clear down the middle. Soundwave’s voice cracked and stopped short again. The shock overrode his automatic reflexes. The fingers in his valve twitched and slid out, mercifully, thankfully, and Soundwave tried to breathe—

And then something else, something thicker and distinctly not finger-shaped that Soundwave instinctively knew better than to think about forced its way in instead. His breath caught in his vents as delicate mesh tore under the Autobot’s careless brutality. 

Without even thinking about it, he supplied the only thing that came to mind in this situation. A recording of Starscream’s begging, two, three, four, until they layered together into unintelligible gibberish. 

The Autobot didn’t stop. The pain exploded harder, sharper, as the _thing_ in his valve was forced down, and back, and thrust into his abused body at a punishing rate that tore Soundwave up from inside.

Soundwave forced his thoughts down, down, down, and stared sightlessly at the error messages stacked three levels deep on his HUD.

* * *

Soundwave looked down at the datapad and his reflection’s red visor looked back at him. His reflection was warped by the shape of the pad, but it was definitely him.

_Is this what it’s going to be like?_

The strange, twisted version of himself that Soundwave had been hearing for hours, now, had suddenly gone tense and cold all at once. There were things to be doing, there was an offensive currently under Soundwave’s own control, and Lord Megatron would be counting on him and the proper use of his outlier abilities to get them through the campaign. 

But it was disconcerting to hear another mech think about themselves in his name, with his position. It was stranger to think that mech was in pain since the very moment Soundwave had felt his voice screaming out across the cosmos. 

And it was downright disturbing to think that, no matter who the mech was, they were convinced they were integral to the Decepticon cause—and they were in Autobot hands.

Soundwave had informed someone cycles ago, of course. He was a responsible third in command and the situation merited an investigation. 

But there were more important things to be doing than paying attention to one rogue Decepticon with a severe identity disorder. 

Even if the screaming was starting to really grate on Soundwave’s nerves.

* * *

Soundwave hadn’t realized he was still running a loop of Soundwave’s begging until the last of his memory files got sorted out andput back in place. It…didn’t matter, not really, not now. It was clear they wouldn’t listen.

But Soundwave couldn’t bring himself to turn it off. 

Just in case. 

It was an entirely futile hope, of course, but it was still worth hoping.

The Autobots had sated themselves on his frame, and Soundwave hoped that meant the end, but instead his painful coil of tentacles found itself back in the jetformer’s hand. The jet said something to the biggest one, and he laughed, and then the jet laughed, and Soundwave tried not to cringe as he scoured his still-dizzy head for the codes to the Nemesis, and then—

Frag, were they still not done?

Energon-slick hands forced his thighs open again, and then his own tentacles—his own tentacles, the fragging indignity; were Woundwave paying attention he’d be almost impressed at how ironic it was—and then the knot made of his own tentacles was shoved roughly into the damaged maw of his valve. 

The ends of his tentacles had an electric current coursing through them; they always did. Soundwave was too exhausted, too agonized, to even scream, but the electricity in the open wounds inside of him was nothing but pure torture. They kept holding him down. He coudn’t get away. 

Finally, finally, after what felt like years of trying to find it, finally Soundwave pulled the radio signal frequency out of the scattered depths of his memory banks and tried to make a connection, only to reach static ont he other end.

No. 

No. No. No.

He tried again, spark suddenly in his throat. Static. No response. No. No. No. No. No. He needed to reach the Nemesis. No. He _had to._ He tried another code. Nothing. Static and interference. He tried a third, and the sounds of some kind of fleshy noise assaulted his audials; no. No. No. No. No. Almost outside of his notice, one of the Autobots started to twist away at Soundwave’s fingers, bending joints backwards until they creaked and broke. No. No. He needed to get in contact with the Decepticons. He had to. There wasn’t another option. 

He tried the urgent line. He tried Megatron’s secure comm, a frequency he wasn’t supposed to even have. He tried whatever frequency he could; it made no difference, no use. 

Soundwave was alone.

And then he remembered something else that had put itself out of his mind; Soundwave paused his running programs, glared balefully at the Autobots one last time, and forcibly shut himself down.

* * *

The last thing soundwave had expected was to slowly come back online to the unmistakeable feeling of someone prodding at his sense of self. He sent a warm reassurance to Laserbeak instinctively…

Then he received a sharp flash of amusement, and then someone was shaking him , physically, and he _had_ to be awake to notice that, wasn’t that weird? He onlined his optic suite and found himself staring at a blank ceiling. Faintly purple. Soundwave approved of that. It probably meant no more Autobots.

“You’re awake,” a distinctly harmonious voice said. Soundwave could _feel_ under those layers of resonance the same presence he’d thought was Laserbeak. 

But Laserbeak was… was… was dead. And this was definitely not Laserbeak.

Soundwave turned his visor to face the other and found himself gazing into the red visor of a blue mech with a helm that, like Soundwave’s own, bore a striking resemblance to the Decepticon badge. This mech was blue, silver and crimson, with a square glass panel across his broad chest. 

“Who are you?” the stranger asked.

_“Designation: Soundwave.”_

The stranger tilted his head ever so slightly, in a motion Soundwave recognized as his own gesture of amusement. _“My_ designation is Soundwave.”

Soundwave looked tat the mech flatly, waiting for it to be denied. Instead,the mech gazed back at him evenly. 

_”Designation: Soundwave,”_ Soundwave repeated. 

The alternate mech claiming to be Soundwave sighed. “This can be dealt with later. Do you know where we are?”

Soundwave paused, and then shook his head slowly. 

“We are on board the Harbinger,” the stranger said.

The Harbinger was in multiple pieces on Earth. Soundwave shook his head. _“Harbinger: not functional.”_

The stranger stared at him. 

Soundwave stared back. 

“The Harbinger is functional,” the stranger said eventually, sounding vaguely discomfited. “We’re currently travelling to a warworld…why are you so confused?”

_“Harbinger: destroyed on Earth.”_

The stranger shook his head. “On what?”

Soundwave didn’t bother to dignify that with a response. 

“I don’t know who you are—”

 _“Designation: Soundwave_ ,” Soundwave repeated.

“—but I do know you have a Decepticon badge, and taht means that I want to help you,” the stranger stressed. 

Soundwave nodded once.

“What planet are you from?”

Soundwave stared at him blankly for a moment, and then projected an image of Cybertron to his visor. Or. Tried. An error message popped up warning him that his screen was badly damaged. _“Cybertron.”_

The stranger looked down at his servos for a second and then back. His body language practically radiated frustrated confusion. “Are you sure about that?”

Soundwave gave him a flat look.

“Alright. Where from? Which city?”

_“Kaon.”_

The blue mech sighed. “Did something happen to you that changed the color of your inner energon?”

Soundwave stared in confusion. He glanced down at his rough-patched arm, and the seams still looked just as blue as they always did. He shook his head slowly. 

“You… are aware your energon is blue?”

Soundwave nodded. He was starting to have a bad feeling about this. 

“Not purple?”

_“Energon: is blue.”_

The mech gave him a flat look. “Not in th— _not in this universe, it’s not_.” 

Soundwave gave him a quizzical look as the mech stood up. “I need to comm Shockwave.”


End file.
